Quote Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth View Post
Because people asked for it?
I haven't seen this, and I think it's a gross misrepresentation of general forum opinions.

I've seen people asking for a return of FFXI-style content. This isn't FFXI-style content. This is the FFXI-style grind coupled with the utter mindlessness of FFXIV-style content, creating an unholy marriage of mindless grinding a la the Atma stage of the 2.x Relic weapon. I haven't seen anyone asking for this.

What the OP is pointing out is that games like FFXI had smart mechanics introduced to help mitigate the feel of the grind. Things like skillchains and magic bursts and unique jobs meant that every time a party had to replace someone, the dynamic shifted a bit. Different monsters having fundamentally different mechanics meant every few levels, when your camp shifted, the feel of the battles was altered. Things like Level Sync mitigated one of the long-time complaints from the early days of FFXI. This was present in end-game content, too; rather than spamming Kirin all the times, people had to farm pop items from the lesser Gods, which themselves required pop items... all of which meant that people didn't burn out on Kirin within a few weeks, because you didn't run Kirin five times a day, seven days a week. Similar situation with Abyssea, wherein Lights and Atma and a varied mix of popped and non-popped NMs and items to chase kept the grind spaced out.

All of this was utterly ignored with Eureka, the result of which is an uninspired piece of content that nobody was asking for.